His uncle […] diverted him from that pursuit, and gave him a cornetcy in his own regiment.

His wife, a small woman who walked always on high heels, borrowed Gerhardie's primus stove several times a day to cook her husband gargantuan meals of cockles, mussels, snails, and other such unpalatables.

In the hands of a genuinely well-meaning Arts Council, it also means 'power', exercised by some genuinely well-meaning quangocrat.

Those files were wiped off the face of the earth.